LUCKY LADY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3773, 6 July 1926, Page 82

LUCKY LADY.

By Cicely Fox Smith. (Copyright.—For the Witness.) “Buy a nice basket, my lucky lady,” said the gipsy woman in her wheedling sing-song, “buy a few clothes-pega—-they’re grand pegs —and your luck’ll never leave you.” She lounged in the door of tea shop, bold-eyed, brown-faced, raven-haired, in broken boots, shapeless hat, and dusty shirt that trailed askew, a laden basket on one hip, a baby as brown as herself hitched on the other in the fold of a ragged shawl, but holding herself with the nameless arrogant grace which was her heritage from generations of vagrant ancestors. Claire shook her head. Blit it wasn’t a very determined shake, and .here was a twinkle lurking in her eyes all the time. Claire liked the Romany folk, the “didakai,” who came trailing through the streets of the old forest town with their baskets and bee-skeps, their free lordly bearing, their soft, wheedling speech. They seemed to bring a breath of romance with them, somehow, into the not over-interesting routine of life ns a “refined lady assistant” in Ye Olde Farmhouse Tea Rooms. Ye Farmhouse was really two old thatched cottages knocked into one, and it stood at the junction of the three roads which branched off, one to Southampton, one to London, and the third through the forest to Bournemouth. Through the door, as she went to and fro with pots of tea and plates of cakes, Claire could see the broad white ribbon •f the forest road winding seaward through thickets of Loteli and holly, by

clumps ot pines, and oaks that were new when the Red King, died, and wide heathery stretches where the ponies grazed, aDd woodland glades where the gipsies pitched their caravans. , Claire had been a “refined lady assistant” for a couple of months. A nervdtis breakdown had put an end for a time to- her work in a London office. The doctor had strongly advised her to get into the country air, and give her biain a complete rest; and since, when your private means are precisely nil, unlimited holidays are out of the question, a change of work seemed to be the next best thing. Mrs Pottinger’s advertisement iseunded deciuedly attractive, though Claire soon learned by experience that the only difference between a “refined lady assistant” and a common or garden waitress was chat the latter got rather less work and more pay. “Buy a nice bit o’ lace, love,” said the gipsy. Wise in the ways of human nature like all her kind, she hud detected that tell-tale twinkle in Claire’s eyes, and pressed home her advantage. “Give me a stale cake for the pretty baby. You’ve a lucky face, my lady. Share your luck with the poor person’s child!” Claire could ne;.r say “No” to a Romany. And it really was rather a sweet baby. She sighed, and, producing a penny, stuffed it into the dimpled, b wn fist. “Bless you, my lucky lady,” intoned the poor person, as she stalked forth into the street with the proud grace of a Roman Empress. “I can see a fine fortune coming down the road for you this minute.” “Fine fortune fiddle!” laughed Claire to herself. “But I could do with a bit of plain luck and no mistake!” And just at that moment she tripped on one of “ye olde-worlde” rag rugs, which were such a feature of the place, and shoL a trayload of the best teacups across the imitation red-tile linoleum. “There’s a bit of your fine fortune,” sniggered Beatie Barnes, the other assistant, “five-and-six for breakages off your next week’s screw’. Fancy giving good money to that gipsy trash! I’d soon have shifted her, and so would old Potty, let me tell you! She don’t hold with encouraging ’em.” Old Potty, be it said, was Miss Barnes’s irreverent mode of designating that extre: iy capable woman, Mrs Pottinger, just then away for a few days on business connected with the starting of another Olde Farmhouse in a suitable spot. Beatie w'as emphatically not a refined lady assistant. She was a highcoloured, showy, loud-voiced girl, and the all-absorbing interest of her life was what she “fellow’s.” She had a large face which somehow gave a superficial impression of frankness and good nature, and it w'as not until you looked closer tnat you saw hei eyes w’ere set too near together, and that her mouth had mean lines about it. “Lucky lady, indeed!” said Claire ruefully to herself. And even then, if she had only known, there was coming rolling out of the forest, along the wonderful road that led seaward, a machine with a god inside it, in the form of a little two-seater car. There are, of course, as everyone knows, two-seaters and two-seaters. This was an aristocrat among two-seaters; all blue paint and blue leather upholstery to match, and silver-plated gadgets, and a little silver image of Eros or some equally naughty, classical personage standing on one toe on its bonnet. It pulled up outside Ye Farmhouse, and from it there stepped the daintiest little pocket Venus imaginable, followed by a tall young man. Everything about her looked expensive, from her little close-fitting hat that was so absurdly simple it couldn’t possibly have cost less than five guineas, to the* latest thing in lizard-skin, French shoes which shod her tiny feet, from her splendid furs to the string of milky pearls encircling a plump throat which—truth compels the admission—was as carefully powdered as her tip-tilted nose. She swept into the tea room, exuding shrill chatter and expensive Bond street perfume, and her cavalier followed slowdy and silently in her wake. He was a very cross-looking cavalier indeed. His face, which could, one fancied, be quite pleasant when it Uked, was all tied up in a frown, and he scarcely uttered a word in the intervals of his companion’s flow of talk. “Coo!” breathed Beatie in Claire’s ear, as the latter filled up a plate of cakes for the newcomers. It was a quiet time just then, and there were no other customers in the shop. “That’s Lily Bellmore; you know, the ore that made the big hit in “The Girl Kamschatka.” She married sons *sig pot down this way—the Honourable Somcthing-or-other. That’s not him with her, though. He’s quite middle aged. They say sne’s always got some fresh fellow hanging around. They’ll have been to a dance tea in Bournemouth, I shouldn’t wonder.” Claire carried them their tea and cakes, and the ycw.g man jumped up and took the tray out of her hands. She was so astonished that she very nearly dropped it, and added some more items to her "already lengthy list of breakages. And as he took it her eyes and his eyes met, and she was surprised to see what a very pleasant young man he looked when he wasn’t scowling. He b>d Etc* grey eys* that wrinkled at the corners, ana a big mouth that smiled iust the least bit crookedly; and altogether he wasn’t at all the sort of person you w? ild expect to see taking the Honourable

Lily Something-or-other to a dance tea in the afternoon. You associated him more with out-of-doors—with dogs, and horses, and heathery smelling tweeds, and all kinds of things that go with country air—than with an overeated dance room and the bUre and scream of a jazz band. It was the Honourable Lily’s turn to look cross now. She tapped her expensive shoe on the floor impatiently, and cast a glance at Claire that made her colour to the roots of her hair. Evidently this jocket Venus didn’t like her attendant swains to be commonly civil to anyone else. She complained of the tea. She grumbled at the cakes. She said (this in Claire’s hearing) that these girls were too slow for a funeral, and if this was her show they’d have to get a wiggle on. And she finished up by flouncing out of the shop in a pet, with her cross-looking cavalier lagging behind. They hadn’t been gone more than half a minute before the young man was back again. “I saj’,” he said, “Mrs Renny thinks she dropped something in here—a string of pearls or something. Do you see it anywhere about?”

And instead of saying “No,” which would have been perfectly true, Claire found herself stammering, and reddening, and altogether looking exactly like a girl who had seen a string of pearls and didn’t intend to say anything about it. What she had seen was something quite different. She had seen Beatie, in that short half-minute which had elapsed since they left the shop, stoop and pick up something from the floor by the table they had occupied, and after a furtive glance round, slip the something into the pocket of the artgrene overall which was part of the “tout ensemble” of Ye Farmhouse ! Beatie didn’t turn a hair. She went down on her knees and pretended to look under the chairs, and shook the tablecloth, and hazarded the suggestion that it might have fallen in the coal scuttle. And Claire stood and looked guilty. The long young man said it didn’t matter. The pearls were very likely in the car All the time, or sticking to Mrs Renny somewhere. “Don’t worry, really,” he added, catching sight of Claire’s distressed face. “They’re sure to turn up all right.” Claire only looked more guilty than ever. Of course the pearls wouldn’t turn up. They weren’t in the car. or sticking to their owner’s expensive little person. They were in Beatie Barnes’s pocket: and the worst of it was that the young man with the kind eyes would certainly think Claire had got them. Well, she hadn’t—and she would probably never see him again—so why worry ! But she did worry. She worried all night. And she saw the young man again, and that no later than the very next day. He came strolling in early in the afternoon, when the place was quiet, and sat down at the same little table and ordered tea and cakes. He asked Claire if she knew of a good place to get films developed. And then he hummed and hawed, and looked this way and that way, and stood first on one leg and then on the other, as people always do who are trying to screw themselves up to broach an unpleasant subject, and don’t quite know how to begin. But he never said a word about the pearls. Claire was more than ever convinced he thought she had got them by the way his eyes followed her round all the time when he thought she wasn’t looking. As for Beatie, he never even looked at her, so it was plain he didn’t suspect her at all. He came again the next day, and the day after that. The first time he mentioned that he wanted *o see the Norman Priory; the next, that he had come to get the films he had left to be done the day but one before. And still not a word about the pearls. If only it hadn’t been for that horrid complication, Claire would have been just as pleased as under existing circumstances she was the reverse to see him come into the shop. She had taken an unreasoning liking to this long young man with the plain, kind face. And she hated to think that he suspected her of being a kind of thief. And then, suddenly, she had a bright idea. She wondered she hadn’t thought of it before, It was Beatie’s evening out. What could be easier than to get hold of the pearls while she was gone, and then, the next time he came to the shop, give them to him and tell him the other assistant had , found them? Of course he might not believe her, but somehow Claire felt that he would. Quickly she slipped across the landing and into Beatie’s untidy room, with its litter of discarded fripperies and powderstrewn dressing-table. Yes, therejvere the pearls, carefully folded in tissue paper in a ebrner of the top drawer. It was the work of a moment to slip them into her pocket, ready to be stowed in a place of safety in her own room. Beatie’s uneasy manner the next morning and the spot of colour which burned on her cheeks showed that she had discovered her loss. Bue she said nothing. For one thing, Mrs Pottinger was back tioned that he wanted to see the Norman and was busy going into the accounts. Claire came into the shop with some cakes from the bakery just in time to hear her say: “I find I’m fifteen shillings short, Miss Barnes. Can you explain it?” Beatie, scarlet-cheeked, looked desperately round, and her eyes fell on Claire. “I don’t know, I’m sure,” she said, defiantly, “you’d better ask her?” She gave a toss of her head in Claire’s direction. “Oh,” gasped Claire, “oh, how dare you? What do you mean?” “A nice name she’s been giving the place while your back’s been turned,” went on Beatie, now thoroughly warmed up. “What with keeping some jools that a customer lost in the shop, and having a fellow come in every day to talk to her. 1 '

Mrs Pottinger turned an inquiring stare upon Claire.

“Perhaps you’ll kindly explain, Miss Mailing,” she said coldly. Claire couldn’t say anything. She was so taken aback by Beatie’s preposterous onslaught that she didn’t know where to begin. Also, she began to realise that things were going to be very hard to explain. The missing pearls were in her possession. Who would belive her tale of how they came to be there! A mist blurred her sight, and her eyes brimmed over with scalding tears. And then, suddenly, a voice she know said: “Hallo—what’s all the bother?” “Only Miss Prim here’s pinched your lady friend’s pearls,” said Beatie shrilly, “and trying to put it on me, if you ever heard tell of such a thing!” The long young man looked from one to another of them with a puzzled frown. And Claire’s dazed brain suddenly began to work again. She went unstairs without a word and came down with the pearls in her hand. “There they are,” she said, holding them out to him on her palm. “I saw that girl pick them up, and I took them so that I could give them back to you. I know you thought I had them. Perhaps you’ll think so still. If you do I can’t help it.” “But I don’t think so,’’ said the young man slowly. “I never did. Because as it happens I also saw this other young person trouser ’em.” He paused. “And it really doesn’t matter so very much, does it—because, you see, they’re nothing but sham ones!” “I say,” said the young man suddenly, “let's get out of this! I’ve got something rather private I want to say to you.” Claire went and got her hat and they walked out of the shop, although it was just beginning to be the busy time, and the little tables were filling up with customers. She seemed to be in a kind of delightful dream; one of those golden dreams which come to mo6fc people once or twice in a life-time. They walked side by side together .up that road of wonder along which the little car of destiny had come so short a time ago, until they came to a tall clump of pines whose singing crests were touched with sunset. And there the young man paused. “Look here,” he said, “there’s something I want to say. I was trying to get it said all the time you thought I was sleuthing those blessed pearls. You know, I’m a most awful ass about getting things said—especially things that matter > There’s no holding me when I get going. It’s taking the plunge that bothers me. Well, it’s this way! “I came down here to be old Renny’s secretary. Why, you don’t even know my name. It’s Manning—Gordon Manning, but my friends mostly call me Bill. I hadn’t reckoned on having to take his missus out to dances in the afternoon, though. I’in the world’s worst secretary, and I’m also the world’s worst dancer. So I made up my mind to cut it. “I’d pretty well made up my mind that day I came here and saw you. And that settled it. I kept coming in to that blessed shop intending to tell you all about myself, and that I wanted to know you better, and so on, and so forth; and then I couldn’t do anything but look at your dear face, and the way you walked, and think how jolly you looked in that smock thing you wear, and how nice it would be if you were making tea for nobody else but me—and somehow I never got anything said at all. “I say: This is wh,at I’m driving at, I’m going out to Australia in a bit, to help a friend of mine that breeds horses there. He’s got a nice home and a jolly little wife. And he says there’s a little house for me if I want to get married any time ’’ He paused and, taking both her hands in his, drew her to him and looked down into her eyes. “Well? What about it?” And just what Claire said I really can t say, not being there at the time. The reel squirrel might know that peeped down at them from the pine tree, or the woodpigeon that kept on coo-rooing in the branches as its ancestors had done since the Forest was really new. But T rather think on the whole that the answer was in the affirmative.